Maximizing Persistent Stacking
A guide on optimal Persistent Spell stacking by Dirich. Introduction This guide can be useful if you are playing catch-up in persistent casts when switching T2 class, or if you want to focus on persistent stacking during Persistence Week (whose weekly bonus doubles the stacking of Persistent Spells). Note that in most cases you completely forego the chance of profits when you employ these strategies, and that spell casts are related to FPS, as such stacking on Kongregate is way worse than stacking on Steam (by about a factor of 2 if you have a good PC, at least for what concerns casting evocations). Preparations This guide focuses on how to maximize stacking in terms of equipment, spell bar, pet to use and Attribute points distribution. Still, upgrades are useful (e.g. Pet Experience ones if you use , Character Ability Power for , etc), hence you should start from what is specified in this guide and use any remaining Attribute Point, unassigned Spell or Item slot and any other free choice you are left with for the purpose of maximizing profits (and thus maximizing upgrades bought). Simply use the relevant class guide to complete the run preparation and perform the setup up to the first small burst and source maximization via . Afterwards perform a second burst to complete the run setup. Spell Caveat The spell order matters. Never modify it. Pet Caveat To anybody with access to T3 pets, it should be obvious that anywhere is suggested, should be used instead. Albeit in most cases the advatange is mainly in farming dust, since we already are at maximum stacking speed. Archon Note: any profit run will guarantee you to maximum stacking. This section is mainly for those that are too lazy to even setup a proper profit run for . The class is the easiest to setup for maximum stacking. In fact, you don't even need to perform the mini bursts and the source maximization phase. What you absolutely should not do is to ever put on the bar: it needs to stay at 0 (fake and real) casts! Indicative e''xpected casts per minute:'' 3.6e3 (as soon as has been stacked a bit). Note: ''you can achieve the same result by playing normally, but with this guide you are immediately at maximum casts per second, while when playing normally you will need a pet of high enough level (to generate enough Autoclicks per second to ensure that is never lacking charges). Attribute Points Distribution * 150 Intelligence (necessary for ) * 0 Insight * 0 Spellcraft * 200 Wisdom (gets up to 250 thanks to ) * 0 Dominance * 0 Patience * 0 Mastery * 0 Empathy Pet is enough. No need to level up to . Equipment No upgrade is really relevant. Spell Bar Shaman The class is the only one with two persistents: , whose purpose is to help level up the pet, and , whose only purpose is to massively speed up charging time. Keep in mind that in the beginning the issue is charging, over time it will switch to discharging, but for a long time it will be an issue of balancing the two. The consequence is that there are two item sets (and pet choices): one for when stacks is not high enough, and one for when it is. This threshold value is currently unknown exactly, but we know it is between 2.27e7 (the value at which, when using , you will finally be stuck at max charges all the time when using the equipment with ) and 3.2e7 (note that getting from 2.2e7 to 3.2e7 is a matter of less than a week if you use , while getting to 2.2e7 is more like a couple of months). There are also two spell sets, depending on what you want to optimize the stacking of between and . The suggestion is to focus on stacking until you reach the threshold previously discussed. On the bright side it seems that is better than at charging (if you can produce enough Autoclicks, which even if it were not to be true when you have no stacks of , it will soon be). This means there might be a window at the beginning where you might prefer to play to stack . The following values are from tests where persistent cast count was 2.4e6 (which means I'm still not charging fast enough to reach full stacking potential). ''Indicative e''xpected casts per minute (optimizing for ):'' 835 for , 246 for . Indicative e''xpected casts per minute (optimizing for ):'' 1.01e3 for , 180 for . After the threshold is reached, you can maximize and at once. The results are for 4.02e7 persistent casts of . Indicative e''xpected casts per minute:'' 1.69e3 for , 771 for . Attribute Points Distribution For most Attributes the distribution is fixed. * 150 Intelligence (necessary for ) * 0 Insight * 200 Spellcraft (necessary for ) * 175 Wisdom (to get perks up to 225 thanks to ) * 0 Dominance * 175 Patience (to get perks up to 175) When stacks are over threshold: * 175 Mastery (for ) * 175 Empathy (for ) When stacks are under threshold and you are optimizing for : * 175 Mastery (for ) * 0 Empathy When stacks are under threshold and you are optimizing for : * 0 Mastery * 0 Empathy Pet When stacks are over threshold: . When stacks are under threshold and optimizing for , especially if the stacks are at or over 2.27e7: .'' When stacks are under threshold and optimizing for : ''Irrelevant (there is difference between pets, but it is minimal). If you are under threshold and optimizing for you should use the pet you prefer for whatever other purpose you might have, like using to collect more crafting dust. Still, if you really want to know, in order from best to worse it is: > (if properly leveled and after 2 days) > (if properly leveled) > , , , (if around level 200) > > > others. When under threshold the issue with is that it needs both and , but until you are under threshold sacrificing to equip results in a stacking loss. With only the shard generation interval of will not go under 1 second, and as such it is worse than (a properly leveled) (which explains why the latter is the pet used when optimizing for while its casts are under threshold). When over threshold is way better than (comparison made at 6d of pet time) and doesn't require days to become effective, only some minutes of levelling, unlike the latter. Equipment When stacks are over threshold (enchants for Character Ability Power are important): All that matters is the shard generation interval on , and for that you need a lot of Charater Ability Power. When stacks are under threshold and you are optimizing for : When stacks are under threshold and you are optimizing for : The interesting bonus, in preference order, are: Pet Experience (depending on pet) > Summoning Efficiency > Character Ability Power. Unless you are over the threshold, then only Character Ability Power matters (you should use a Pet Experience set to level before starting to stack). In practice, time is what will bring the best results. Because of scaling from accumulated Autoclicks or direct time scaling (for class and, potentially, pet). Spell Bar When casts are over threshold: When optimizing for stacking and casts are under threshold: When optimizing for stacking and casts are under threshold: Note: if you do not have 100% crit with the last spellbar, depending on the exact amount you have it might be ideal to replace with , to increase your crit chance ( charges with crits). Temporalist This is the weirdest class when it comes to stacking persistent. A surprising fact is that Time Distortion is irrelevant for this stacking, you could run with to keep it to almost 0 and nothing would change (granted you would need with and to ensure you always have more spell charges than you can cast). Indicative e''xpected casts per minute:'' 4.88e3 (at the beginning it will stack slower due to bonus being low, so I measured this number after the first 4e3 stacks, when the stacking speed in the short time frame finally saturated for me). Attribute Points Distribution * 150 Intelligence (necessary for ) * 0 Insight * 200 Spellcraft (necessary for ) * 175 Wisdom (to get perks up to 225 thanks to ) * 0 Dominance * 0 Patience * 0 Mastery * 0 Empathy You can put 0 in Wisdom if you accept that you need to use with and to generate the spell shards necessary to maximize the stacking. Pet Irrelevant. All pets provide the same stacking. Equipment No upgrade is really relevant. Spell Bar Note: '' can be substituted with , but having them both does not provide any additional casts, as you can already reach the theoretical maximum. The additional two incantations are not necessary, but you need Accumulated spell casts to improve the ability of , so they need to be on bar at least until your total incantation duration reduction makes duration go at, or under, 0.5 seconds, so that each real cast counts double. This happens once you have 1.77e5 casts (check the item description). Quirks (irrelevant section, just a for fun read) If you use a level 200 , on a character level 247 ( generates 75 Compressed Time per cast), add to the Spell Bar, the suggested items but switching with and adding, and , the items (except for the ring) and filling the rest with Character Ability Power items, while also adding to the spell bar, the following inexplicable things happen: # Using both and results in faster stacking than just using the former, even though if you think about Compressed Time generation it would look like this souldn't be the case. # When using as pet, you an achieve way better stacking than with other pets, unless your Evocation Efficiency is too low, or unless it is too high! If you are not within this 'sweet spot', the stacking will be very similar to the other pets. In #2 I am not sure if there is only 1 sweet spot or multiple ones. While using a lot of Character Experience items, I have found a lower and a upper bound: * Evocation Efficiency Upper Bound: between 2.27e59% and 2.63e59%. * Evocation Efficiency Lower Bound: between 3.74e56% and 5.92e57%. When satisfying all these conditions stacking with results '''consistently' in 2.3e3 casts per minute, while with any other pet the amount of casts is 1.83e3 casts per minute. The setup in this example is faulty as it doesn't use . But it shows that there's weirdness going on. In fact, from time to time I've been able to achieve 4.35e3 casts of per minute when the test outcome would usually be 3.7e3. I did it with multiple pets and using many variations of equipment. 'Even with the exact setup currently suggested '(while also casting though)! In short, from time to time we get more casts per minute than we normally get, but I have not been able to identify the cause of this, and, as such, design a setup to consistently increase the cast per minute. Category:Guide